Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Saturday, December 24, 2005

The Latest Conspiracy Theory: the Oil-for-Food Investigation Is a Yankee Plot

…nearly two months after the $35 million U.N.-backed probe that collected all those documents exposed just how troubled the program was, there has been no rush by the authorities in question to study it

writes the AP's Nick Wadhams (merci à Robert Tracinski). Nor do any of the European media outlets seem to have made much about it. (And why should they? It is not a scandal that involves the continent's favorite bogeyman. It's true that it's a subject far less interesting than tales of American torture.)

Some experts suspect there are governments that don't want to investigate their own complicity, or that treat bribery as the price of doing business abroad, or simply have judicial machinery that grinds slowly.

Of course, we are told that besides the United States, some "of the most active prosecutors are in … France".

But guess what? The scandal has not, and will not, be used to bash France through and through (that's reserved for les Américains), but to show, au contraire, how it proves how efficient and open and honest and forward-looking the country is.

Double standards.

Now.

Always.

Forever.

…the most prominent Jordanian mentioned in the report, Fawaz Zureikat, … who has denied any wrongdoing, offers a widely held claim that the oil-for-food investigation is a largely U.S.-led campaign to discredit the United Nations.